


Carbon copy

by Radiolaria



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Non-Canonical Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-15
Updated: 2014-09-15
Packaged: 2018-02-17 13:59:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2312132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Radiolaria/pseuds/Radiolaria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carbon copy:  “a person or thing that is identical or very similar to another”</p><p>The Doctor wanders into a doubly forbidden time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Carbon copy

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the ["River" challenge](http://who-contest.livejournal.com/210961.html) at who-contest.
> 
> Not beta-read: any grammatical, syntactical or scientific approximation is mine.

_It’s the carbon cycle all over again,_ he observes.

Dust to life, life distilled to dust, etc.

Circle. Except, projected on an axis, the movement of endpoints rotating around the centre on the circumference and always separated by the diameter is back and forth, back and forth.

Opposite directions. Unless the looping comes to a standstill.

The moment she mended his last breath with her lives bore inside this calculated risk.

Elsewhere, he always suspected a life acquired at her lives’ cost came with a half-life, shelf life.

Elsewhere, _she_ expired.

Here, _he_ is gathering dust and watching himself die.

He doesn’t know exactly for how long he has been dying, for how long she has been watching. He doesn’t even know how she killed him. He simply stepped onto his death like he would in Clara’s apartment. TARDIS wailing down his neck. Hands in his pockets. Boundaries between the Universes breached.

Out of boredom.

He is standing so still he cannot understand how she doesn’t notice him against the aerial traffic painting the background.

Hunched over the body, she reclines wide and dry eyes. Her fingers on the hampered pit and pendulum of his chest the only part of her breathing. In blind strokes, she undoes and redoes his buttons, fails to reach his skin and curls his scent into a fist.

Here, she hates him enough to smash what she meticulously put back together in Berlin. Here, she aborted River Song. Two casualties and by the way she persists in not breathing, he suspects she knew.

Berlin showed her River Song and she didn’t like what she saw.

He nearly steps out of the shadows, pushed by a fond impulse to thank her for everything. For everything she did and everything she will not do. Here, she kills him at last.

On the floor, the face he once knew as his fizzles with parasites and she has painful gesture towards his mouth, as if to retain his features. They escape her hands, leaving nothing but glowing dust, until the flow stops halfway through regeneration, pinned in the air like stars.

The Doctor didn’t make it to his next body.

He cracks a whimper when she leans in closer and tries to discern past the suspended curtain of particles and pain. From here, he can almost guess his own blue eyes, staring back at her with the dead stare he should have had the strength to bear in the Library.

She collapses at one point and he cannot move. Here, she gave away her lives and took his. To stop two points from running in opposite directions, endlessly.

It spares him many goodbyes. It spares her eternity.

_Thank you._

He limps back to the TARDIS, besotted. There is a Universe in which she kills him years after Berlin, after Silencio.

Out of boredom.  

In this Universe –his relief Universe-, he loves her for doing so.

The commands blink at him, frame shivering as the Universes erode back around.

Rivers are full of death, spread so thin on the crust of waves no fish can discern it. A tea of organic carbon and one day your fish swallows a bull and your quick dip becomes a burial. Accidentally.

Sounds like the story of their first meeting.

_It never ends. Nowhere._


End file.
